THE ICEMAN COMETH (1973) – Blu-ray Review

American Film Theatre And Kino Classics Present American
Theater Classic With Legendary Stage And Screen Actors

1973/DIRECTED BY JOHN FRANKENHEIMER

STREET DATE: MARCH 26TH, 2019/KINO CLASSICS

Kino Classics takes the innovative mid-1970’s exhibition model of American Film Theatre one step further by bringing the AFT-filmed, 1973 production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh to Blu-ray. Receiving a 2K-restoration, this 2-disc set makes available the 178-minute theatrical cut along with the uncut, 239-minute director’s version. A minute shy of four hours in its complete form, this nearly unexpurgated film-staging of the classic O’Neill chamber-drama, written in 1939 but first staged in 1946, comes complete with not one but two intermission breaks; possibly the first American film in major release to invest such a consideration of the casual moviegoer’s limited attention-span (or, indeed, bladder-space). By play-film’s end, the best compliment one can pay this obviously demanding dramatic experiment — in effect, erasing the boundaries between film and theater towards filmed theater — is that one certainly feels one has lived (and in at least one case died) in close company with Larry Slade, Don Parritt, Jimmy Tomorrow, and all the refuse(d) rest at Harry Hope’s Hudson River-front dive in 1912.

Setting a tone of despair and hopelessness with Bradford
Dillman as Willie Oban’s early stage-screen fit of delirium tremens, director John Frankenheimer’s brilliant staging
of this most uncompromising of American theater classics is equally
uncompromising in bringing the drama to film in the first place. Produced in
the first eight-film “season” of an eventual thirteen theatrical adaptations,
Ely and Edie Landau’s brainchild of quality theatrical productions made with legendary
actors and directors at reasonable prices achieved its most ambitiously-mounted
production in a truly stunning assemblage of actors rarely assembled at the
same time on even a Broadway stage. Selling itself by merely announcing its
cast list, Lee Marvin, Robert Ryan, Fredric March, Moses Gunn, Jeff Bridges,
along with many distinguished others here tread the same boards in as close to
theatrical real-time as the filmed-dramatic unities allow.

Opening on night barman Rocky (Tom Pedi) placing a spittoon under
the bar in anticipation of the evening’s grim revelries, the play proceeds to
anchor itself to the same two-room setting representing an evening, midday,
midnight, and tomorrow in the meandering conversation pieces — in subject
matter if not location — of saloon owner Harry Hope’s (Fredric March)
lost-hopers. Detailing in purely character terms the preparation and aftermath of
Harry Hope’s annual birthday celebration — sixty years old in 1912 — the
drama as such is more concerned with the arrival and lingering effect upon each
of reputedly happy-go-lucky “whiskey drummer” Teddy “Hickey” Hickman (Lee
Marvin), who usually brings drunken joy on his twice-a-year sales-rounding trek
from Astoria but on this day inspires little besides sober misery.

Among those whose humiliations and mounting sense of despair we share over the next lengthy acts of film-stage drama:

Rocky Pioggi (Tom
Pedi) — The night barman, as mentioned, who supplements his low pay with the supervision
of three resident prostitutes, all while insisting he is “not a pimp”.
(Character actor Tom Pedi originated the role on Broadway and played it in many
subsequent productions, including a previous television version from 1961.)

Willie Oban (Bradford
Dillman) — A disgraced former Harvard law student who, as also mentioned, now
battles the DTs. The most physically deteriorated among Harry Hope’s boarders
is also the visibly closest to death. (Actor Dillman sheds any-and-all actor’s
vanity for the role, a stuttering, shaking, teeth-rotten ruin of upper-crust
disappointment.)

Joe Mott (Moses
Gunn) — An aging African American gambler who has “lost his touch” with the
dice. Sweeps up for spare change (and shots), Joe is tolerated/patronized by
the other boarders as the “whitest colored man” in each of their respectively
minimal acquaintance. (Stage veteran Gunn’s is an astonishing performance
switching at will between affability and anger. Seems revelatory in miniature
to what a black man undoubtedly suffered to then survive in a white man’s
world.)

Don Parritt (Jeff
Bridges) — A new arrival to the already depressing scene, late “from the
coast”, the eighteen-year-old has fled the arrest of his mother along with her
anarchist group after the blow-up of a bridge, which included many fatalities. (Three
years and eight films past his first adult role in 1970, Bridges has by now
shared as long a career as many of the stage-and-screen veterans with which he
here appears. As the conscience-stricken young informer, the all-white
travelling suit against the anguish of his pale-drawn features appears right at
home in Harry’s “Last Chance Saloon”.)

Harry Hope (Fredric
March) — The long-widowed and ironically-named proprietor of the Greenwich
village bar and boarding house has a bluster that belies his big heart. Selectively
deaf and sometimes arthritic, each according to psychosomatic whim, Harry
venerates the memory of his overly idealized late wife — whose photograph
hangs above the seat where he nightly holds ruined court — by not having stepped
foot from his establishment since her death twenty years before. (Fredric March,
in his final film, plays the character role to its absolute hilt, the
consummate stage-and-screen presence of a half-century virtually disappearing
beneath the doddering, querulous wreck of a kindly old gent aging
ungracefully.)

Larry Slade (Robert
Ryan) — The saloon’s “resident philosopher” is a former anarchist, onetime
associate of Don Parritt’s mother, Rosa, who long-ago left the movement and has
since been trying, but daily failing — cursed with an “iron constitution
which even Harry’s rot-gut whiskey can’t corrode” — to drink himself to
death. The one barfly with his eyes wide open may also be the least self-aware
even for his considerable depth of perception. (Crowning a career shading some
of the most complex psychologies in movie history, Robert Ryan, also in his
final film, is magnetic — sympathetic yet tortured — delivering this
conflicted character’s many mortality-obsessed, humanity-despairing diatribes.)

Hickey (Lee
Marvin) — The aforementioned “whiskey drummer” (liquor salesman) is straw-boater,
glad-handing dandyism incarnate — a long-straying husband joking about his
long-suffering wife Evelyn’s imaginary and non-existent affairs with the “iceman”
— but on this Spring visit seems hellbent instead on calmly destroying the
many “pipe-dreams” of Harry Hope’s past-hope parishioners. (Lee Marvin, at the
height of his 1970’s $275,000/picture stardom took a $250,000 pay-cut to appear
in possibly the greatest film role of his career, approaching the character’s
madness from a disturbing emotional vantage point of unassailable serenity.)

Rounding out his extended cast-call of the damned are Martyn
Green’s and George Voskovec’s Captain and General, respectively — still
nightly fighting the Boer War even as the Great War looms — John McLiam’s
Jimmy Tomorrow — an unemployable war correspondent silenced by every next day’s
false promises — Clifton James’s ex-policeman Pat McGloin and Sorrell Brooke’s
ex-anarchist Hugo Kalmar — convicted felons and jail-time servers from
opposite sides of the law.

Exorcising the alcoholic ghosts of yesteryear through their
tortured interactions, the denizens of Harry Hope’s saloon collectively raise
the hundred-year dead for our latterday dramatic inspection of history’s many
forgotten — unmarked, and unremarked upon — corpses. Bleary-eyed and whiskey-soaked,
that acting aesthetic extends to their cluttered, kerosene-lit, and cigar
smoke-shrouded surroundings to the point that one can almost smell the stale
and sour vapor of a poorly-ventilated room badly in need of airing. Director
John Frankenheimer, returning to his early-career roots staging single-room
drama for live television, uses visually-unsparing depth-staging and unblinking
long-takes to give us in view-attendance a dramatic proscenium on the
proceedings that foregrounds character and thematic content with the utmost
care, sympathy, and privilege. It is again no understatement to say these full
four hours give these poor devils their necessary due.

As may be expected if one has read this far into the review,
this (re)viewer is a proponent of the full, 290-minute version as opposed to
the hour-less cut. Specifically, as The
Iceman Cometh itself is a drama told through character interaction as
opposed to plot, the unbroken mood of its setting in favor of a more
straightforward mode of telling actually gains in artistic impact by
occasionally boring its audience. Indeed, the most consistent criticism of The Iceman Cometh since its original
staging has been the unfocused, dramatically diffuse (some might say “inert”)
manner of its construction and plotting, but as one of the most complete, sustained
character pieces of American theater one might add that such is the entire
point: without those “dead” moments which skillful actors such as these bring “alive”,
an audience/viewer cannot possibly be given the impression of life (and death)
on these lower-depth inhabitants without having first experienced its sometimes
mind-numbing monotony. Life, death, and the terrible in-between — propped up
by the dry rot of Harry Hope’s collapsing waterfront timber — are here indeed
the full dramatic limbo of empty hopes and dashed dreams.

Along with both the three- and four-hour versions, also
included on Kino Classics’ 2-disc set are a gallery of trailers for other
American Film Theatre productions, which may give one an impression of the
ambitious scope — including actors like Laurence Olivier, Katharine Hepburn, Alan
Bates, among others enacting roles from the dramatic likes of Anton Chekov, Edward
Albee, and Harold Pinter — of the Landau’s innovative
funding-and-distribution model based on a then-unique audience-subscription
service. (A forerunner, perhaps, to today’s KickStarter or GoFundMe.) A brief
archival statement from the late AFT co-founder Ely Landau included on the
second disc explains some of that ambitious scale while a longer, more recent
interview with Edie Landau, also included on the second disc, details some of
the hurdles the often unwieldy project faced (including difficulties with their
subscription partners in ticket-delivery, American Express), along with a
persuasive defense of theater as a suitable subject for film.

Not for everyone, surely, but for those sympathetically aligned with theater as captured by film, Kino Lorber’s admirable 2K transfer of 290-restored-minutes of a great American classic — as brought to stage, screen and now one’s home video viewing mode of choice by some of the grand luminaries of stage and screen — may offer the best dramatic mode of artistic persuasion.

The images used in this review are creditedto DVDBeaver. Thanks to Kino Lorber for providing a Blu-ray copy of the film for review.

From his home in Madison, Wisconsin, Justin is well on his way to achieving his childhood goal of seeing every movie ever made. A devotee of literature and cinema, he's here to share what he's picked up along his lonely cinematic path of the “omniviewer”.
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